My Candle Burns at Both Ends
by Smallvillian
Summary: Just what does Jonathan Kent think about at night, alone with his thoughts?


Title: My Candle Burns at Both Ends

Author: Smallvillian

Rating: G

Feedback: Yes, please

"You're not my father."

The words were said so many months ago but they haunt me still, in my dreams where the mind is free to wander as it will, to explore what it dares not when one is awake. The ghostly, disembodied voice must take some pleasure in the reminding. And in my dreams Clark never comes back and Martha and I, we're suddenly back to the world we knew almost fourteen years ago. Starting over.

I love my wife, but I never realized how it came to be that fatherhood had suddenly come to define me so much as a man. Martha, she's a strong woman and without me would be the same good, independent, feisty redhead I married back then. Any man would have been happy to have her. I was just the lucky guy who happened to ask her first and to my surprise she said yes-- yes, to being stuck with me, my farm, and my probable debt for the rest of her days. I will always be eternally grateful for that, more than I can say. And as a husband I suddenly learned what it was to be two instead of one, to consider more than just myself.

But I think it wasn't until Clark came along that I understood real sacrifice, what it meant to give up so much of yourself for the sake of one person. For years my wife and I were two capable adults creating a home for one another, content with ourselves, knowing the ins and outs of the other, the path of ours lives so easily navigated by two so experienced in life. Then suddenly there was this whole new little person in our lives who looked to both of us for...everything.

Truth be told, for the first couple of weeks Clark was with us I laid awake at night certain that at any moment whatever or whoever had sent him here would come to take him back. But as time passed, I allowed myself the luxury of ignorance. Clark was simply our son and no one would want to take him away from us, but that bliss lasted for all of another week, when our darling toddler, the apple of our eye, handled five hundred pounds with the ease one of his parents picked up a pillow. Suddenly fatherhood became much larger in the scope of my life and strangers became potential threats instead of potential friends. Look what we do to our own kind, after all. Someone happens to have a three year old who can play flawless Mozart and they're on the evening news, sought after like dogs after fresh meat. Dear God, what would they have done to Clark when they found out about him? They'd never stop until they found out where he came from, or rather, where he didn't come from. What would they have done then?

Clark once asked me if his mother or I were ever afraid of him. I told him no but, honestly, I was at first. Not in the way that he described but afraid-- afraid of doing the wrong thing, making the wrong choices for him, of not being able to handle this super-charged little one. There had to be someone out there more equipped, with far more wisdom than I possessed who could raise this boy that surely needed more than a simple farmer could give him. Luckily, for me that wiser person just happened to be the woman I called my wife. She told me that what Clark needed was to be loved, "That's what we can offer him, Jonathan, that no one else can. He'll be good man. He has a good example to follow." I don't know that I've ever had as much faith in myself as my wife does but I've tried hard to be that man, for her and for Clark. To be a good person. To protect my son from those who might see him only for what they can gain from him and not for who he is. To teach him to be a good ma. And if I could do that, I would know my time on this earth was well spent. I've been a good father.

"You're not my father."

I tell myself he didn't really mean it, that every boy says something cruel to his father at least once in his lifetime that he wishes he could take back. I once told my own father he was more suited to being a prison warden than a father and that I wished he had been the former. "I hope you have a son as stubborn as you one day," he told me "then you'll understand how hard it is to be a father." Oh, I understand, dad. I understand. It's times like this that I wish he were still here. Maybe he would know what to do now.

"You're not my father."

The bed creaks as I sit up and look beside me. I worry that Martha may wake but she doesn't, and I'm thankful for that. She knows me so well and would guess that something is troubling me, but I don't want her to know. She has enough worries at the moment. Quietly, I stand and make my way upstairs to indulge myself in an almost forgotten ritual--I stand at my son's bedroom door and watch him deep in sleep to remind myself that he's safe in his own bed, here with us. No one has taken him tonight and they won't as long as I'm here. Not as long as I'm here. You won't take him back now Jor-El. It's too late.

It's Clark or my life. That's what he tells me now. No, I'm not Clark's 'real' father but only for lack of biology. Maybe blood is thicker than love. I don't know anymore. I think maybe Clark wishes he'd had another father, his own true father instead of a farm boy from Smallville, Kansas who can't afford to give him the things he truly deserves. Then I remember my wife's words from so long ago. My life or my son. So I give him the only thing I can.

I love you, Clark.

So take me, Jor-El.


End file.
